This week, an emergency room in the Pacific Northwest was briefly quarantined after five people—including two police officers and a hospital worker—experienced mysterious hallucinations from an unidentified illness believed to be spread by touch.

For the first time ever, researchers have peered into the brains of people tripping out on LSD. The groundbreaking scans reveal the dramatic extent to which the psychedelic drug affects normal brain function, while pointing towards therapies for similar psychological disorders.

The biggest ever scientific study of near-death experiences shows that awareness can continue for a surprisingly long duration after the brain has shut down completely. The finding suggests that these experiences are more than just hallucinations — and that our definition of clinical death should probably be revised.

Think you've never hallucinated? You're wrong. Almost every modern person in a developed country has had this hallucination - some populations have it so predictably that within a few months, ninety-five percent experience it.

Guillaume Néry is a champion freediver, and his sport exposes practitioners to carbon dioxide narcosis, which can lead to, among other symptoms, powerful hallucinations. This short film is inspired by Néry's experiences and the things he thinks he sees during a deep water dive.

Even though sleep paralysis has a logical, scientific explanation, when you experience a sleep paralysis episode, it can feel like you're in a supernatural horror movie. And this short documentary won't make getting back to sleep any easier.

Whenever you imagine any kind of altered reality — from dreams, to drug trips, to warp speed — the main image is always a tunnel, ringed by regular geometric patterns. And most of us see those odd, tunneling patterns at some point in our lives. What exactly is it about our brains that creates them?

We've covered sleep twitches, the unconscious twitches that people make while they're asleep. They're the result of the unconscious and conscious brain both being online at the same time. Sometimes people twitch themselves awake. This is preferable to another strange sleep tic — the sudden sensation of falling that…

File this under "things that should be self-evident", but new research has come out showing that the reason people occasionally gouge their own eyes out isn't because they want to have sex with their mother, or due to Christian religious guilt — it's because of psychotic illness.